Karl Barth

Life and work

Barth was trained in the dominant liberal Protestant theology of turn-of-the-century Germany, but his experience as a young pastor in Safenwil, Switzerland, and his shock at seeing many of his liberal theology professors sign a declaration supporting German war policy in 1914, led him to a fundamental break with liberal theology's confidence in human religious experience and cultural progress.

His 1919 (revised 1922) commentary The Epistle to the Romans reasserted the radical otherness and sovereignty of God against human religious striving, and became a landmark that launched what came to be called "neo-orthodoxy" or dialectical theology, shaking the complacency of the prevailing academic theological establishment.

As professor in Germany during the rise of Nazism, Barth became a leading figure of the "Confessing Church," the movement of German Protestants who resisted the pro-Nazi "German Christians" faction's attempt to align church doctrine with Nazi racial ideology; he was the principal author of the 1934 Barmen Declaration, which asserted Christ alone, not any political leader or ideology, as the church's head, and was dismissed from his professorship and expelled from Germany in 1935 for refusing to swear unconditional loyalty to Hitler.

Barth spent the rest of his career at the University of Basel working on his Church Dogmatics, an immense multi-volume systematic theology (left unfinished at his death) that remains one of the most significant theological works of the twentieth century, influencing Protestant and, increasingly, Catholic theology alike.

In their own words

"Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." (reportedly given when asked to summarize his life's theological work in one sentence)attributed, on summarizing his theology

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: Karl Barth